And Sew Forth

The museum curator Margaret Abrams is deep into preparations for an exhibition on Christian Dior’s legendary 1947 “New Look” collection when mysterious packages start arriving. First a scarf with a “sentimental pattern of hearts, flowers, hot‑air balloons and pairs of dogs,” then a brooch, then another scarf — this one tartan and accompanied by a menacing note: “What side are you on?” Margaret is mystified. What is there to take sides on about the French designer whose work exemplifies “artistry and unapologetic beauty”?

A lot, it turns out. For one thing, as a visiting fashion historian explains, the strange items that keep appearing are “coded signals of the Resistance.” They hint at questions about Dior’s conduct during the Nazi occupation of France, an issue raised more explicitly by a reporter probing the designer’s relationships with people later condemned as collaborators. Margaret’s intern Keitha also keeps pestering her about the corsets used to create his iconic hourglass shape. “How many women really have that ultra-slim, high-breasted, round-hipped silhouette?” she demands. “And yet Dior designed all his clothes on that fantasy.” Keitha’s concerns are reiterated by a group of graduate students who associate the “confining, fantasy-inducing garments” with bondage. Margaret urges them to allow for complexity, to see Dior’s work both “as homages to women and their beauty” and “as expressions of disdain for women.” Privately, though, she resents their insistence on politicizing the exquisitely crafted creations: “Not for the first time, she saw herself as a rare remaining believer in art for art’s sake.” How is she “to rescue her Dior” from these attacks?

Despite herself, Margaret becomes increasingly caught up in what she is learning about the historical context of Dior’s textiles and especially about his contemporaries who did not come through the occupation so unscathed. One of these is Dior’s youngest sister, Catherine, a Resistance fighter who was imprisoned before eventually escaping while on a death march: “While he learned his trade in Lelong’s studio, she risked her life. While she shunned anything German after the war, her brother began taking shows and collections to Germany beginning as early as the late 1940s.”

The curator also discovers the sad story of Fanny Berger, a Jewish hat maker and designer who lost her business and then, at Auschwitz, her life. Can Margaret — should Margaret — look at Dior’s dresses in the same way, with these stories on her mind? What is the right way to understand the relationship between art and life, beauty and politics anyway? These are important questions, and it is surprising that Margaret has apparently not thought seriously about them before. Her naïveté is its own form of resistance, a willed obtuseness in which for too long Margaret takes both refuge and pride. 

It is unclear whether Katherine Ashenburg is ironizing her main character or offering her up as a stand‑in for all those today who, with similar thoughtlessness, rail against the “imposition” of politics onto art they admire or enjoy — an attitude the novel effectively shows to be facile and unsustainable. But Margaret reads like someone we are meant to take at face value and whose re-education is meant to carry both drama and moral weight, a project that falters, partly because Margaret — a trained expert — should know better and also because her musings are more banal than revelatory. When she looks at a photograph of Fanny, for example, we are told: “No matter how many times she read or heard or watched stories about the Holocaust, something in Margaret found it impossible to make sense of the undeniable facts. That this smiling woman had been brutally snuffed out seemed incomprehensible.” Margaret is clearly the one most directly responsible for the leaden cliché, but her credulousness, though gradually corrected, is presented sympathetically rather than critically. Ashenburg’s prose gives no sense that her protagonist is falling short of a capacity for nuance or insight — linguistic, aesthetic, ethical — that the novel itself exemplifies.

An interconnected storyline concerning Margaret’s identity is similarly awkward. She has long avoided confronting the suggestion that her recently deceased father was Jewish — but why, she wonders. “Her aversion stemmed from her father’s,” she rationalizes. “If he didn’t want to talk about it, who was she to barge in?” The obvious explanation for her reluctance to face her own heritage is internalized antisemitism. This uncomfortable possibility is left implied as Margaret instead moves — partly through her newly heightened sensitivity to the horrors of the Holocaust — toward reconciliation with her father’s relatives and a romanticized vision of a “many-coloured” history that “now turned out to be an intimate part of who she was.”

Margaret’s New Look is well conceived and well constructed. The clues that arrive at the museum set up a mystery plot with a solution that neatly ties the book’s different strands together. But the payoff seems scant, the whole scheme an elaborate device to drag Margaret into a more honest understanding of both Dior and herself. How much does she really learn? It’s hard to tell, but, by the end, she has another project in mind: an edition of Fanny Berger’s diary. Perhaps this is just her next enthusiasm, or perhaps the jacket she wears at the exhibition’s gala opening, a reworked version of one of Dior’s designs, indicates a transformation that is substantive as well as stylistic.